1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of wireless communications.
2. Description of the Related Art
There are numerous communication services which carry various forms and combinations of multimedia content such as video, web content, graphics and text. As used in this application, the term “multimedia” refers to any content having a visual element. The mobile terminals of wireless communication networks, particularly phones of cellular networks, are now capable of transporting data, including multimedia data in various communication services. Many types of mobile terminals are being used, such as cellular phones, cordless telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), palm-held computers and laptop computers. The strong push in current wireless technology development is to use mobile terminals for varied applications and to allow users of such devices to seamlessly integrate events and needs in their lives while maintaining adequate communications power to receive and transmit all of the data and information which has an impact on them.
An advanced mobile terminal supported by third generation (3G) and fourth generation (4G) networks and using the latest innovations in computers, software, displays and other technologies may access and receive a variety of many different communication services. Unfortunately, the manner and duration (apparent to the user) of the procedure necessary for switching among the communication services may vary widely and unpredictably. These communication services may be provided by different information sources in other networks and may be based on and built upon a variety of data transfer techniques. This introduces more delay and uncertainty into mobile terminal switching among different communication services.
For at least these reasons, present methods of switching between different communication services at a mobile terminal have disadvantages. Accordingly, there is a need for effective solutions that allow for easy and substantially immediate mobile terminal switching between different communication services without it appearing to the user that the connection is broken at any time.
Prior art solutions have not addressed avoiding unnecessary assignment modifications in the originating side or unnecessary interrupts in data traffic if the terminal on the terminating side decides to reject service change from speech to multimedia or if the modification fails for the termination side user equipment.
In addition, if assignment modification in the originating side for the terminal of the originator side would not be started before knowing that a service change in the terminating side user equipment was successful, then unnecessary assignment modification and unnecessary data traffic interrupt could be avoided in originating side.